Hit the Road

Contents

Host

Broadcast

Synopsis

We think this might have been underrated actually, coming from the Go Getters/Sky Runners school of thought. As far the Beeb were concerned, it was a bit of a PR disaster.

Three teams of two celebs and celebrity referee do stupid tasks in brightly-coloured anoraks for the TV cameras. There was a format to it of sorts.

In Round One, each team would have to complete a certain task and race to a specified point on the map.

In Round Two there was a choice of three tasks and whoever did best in Round One got first pick, then second got to pick and last got the only one left. And they'd do the task and race to a point.

At this point, they'd meet a seemingly random member of the public. Now, whoever got there first would get a distinct advantage in the third and all-important final round.

The teams would be given a set of clues that singled out a certain somebody in the town they were in that is in someway related to the seemingly random person the teams had met up with. We think they also had to answer three questions that were sealed in an envelope. Anyway, the teams would have to find this one person (a different one for each team) as fast as possible and then go to places and predict the answers to the questions. Once done, they'd have to race back to the start and set off the cannons. However, if they got a question wrong they'd get a time penalty, which meant staying still for 1, 2 or 3 minutes depending on how well they did in Round 2.

Are you following? It's a lot more fun that it sounds.

And that's because they actually got some quite good celebrities on sometimes, or at least ones that were vaguely interesting to watch with some good interplay. Each of the team's referees were very different as well, especially Annabel Giles who would give time penalties to their team for the stupidest of reasons. It didn't matter though because it was always funny.

It didn't get the viewers it wanted (3.69 million, to be precise) which we think is, y'know, a shame.

Inventor

The original idea was as when the idea was played out as a practical joke for one of Noel Edmonds' Gotchas - some celebs were asked to play along to a (completely ficticious) show called Out On A Limb. Three teams were supposedly playing, but in fact only one team did the tasks while the other two sat back and watched the others making fools of themselves. The final challenge would be to open the hotel safe, and you'd never guess what shiny Gotcha style objects were waiting inside!